rendezvous appeared to be those same shabby quick-lunches in back streets or even on the principal thoroughfares about Times Square, or they met in each other’s rooms or my office at night after I had gone, giving me as an excuse that they had work to do.  And during all this time the air fairly hummed with rumors of new singers, dancers, plays, stories being begun or under way, articles and essays contemplated; avid, if none too well financed frolics or bohemian midnight suppers here and there.  Money was by no means plentiful, and in consequence there was endless borrowing and “paying up” among them.  Among the most enthusiastic members of this circle, as I had begun to note, and finally rather nervously, were my art-director, a valiant knight in Bohemia if ever there was one, and she of Bryn Mawr-Wellesley standards.  My makeup editor, as well as various contributors who had since become more or less closely identified with the magazine, were also following him up all the time.

If not directly profitable it was enlivening, and I was fairly well convinced by now that from the point of view of being “aware,” “in touch with,” “in sympathy with” many of the principal tendencies and undercurrents which make for a magazine’s success and precedence, this group was as valuable to me as any might well be.  It constituted a “kitchen cabinet” of sorts and brought hundreds of interesting ideas to the surface, and from all directions.  Now it would be a new and hitherto unheard-of tenor who was to be brought from abroad and introduced with great noise to repute-loving Americans; a new sculptor or painter who had never been heard of in America; a great actor, perhaps, or poet or writer.  I listened to any quantity of gossip in regard to new movements that were ready to burst upon the world, in sculpture, painting, the scriptic art.  About the whole group there was much that was exceedingly warm, youthful, full of dreams.  They were intensely informative and full of hope, and I used to look at them and wonder which one, if any, was destined to have his dreams realized.

Of L——­ however I never had the least doubt.  He began, it is true, to adopt rather more liberal tendencies, to wish always to be part and parcel of this gayety, this rushing here and there; and he drank at times—­due principally, as I thought, to my wildling art-director, who had no sense or reserve in matters material or artistic and who was all for a bacchanalian career, cost what it might.  On more than one occasion I heard L——­ declaring roundly, apropos of some group scheme of pilgrimage, “No, no!  I will not.  I am going home now!” He had a story he wanted to work on, an article to finish.  At the same time he would often agree that if by a certain time, when he was through, they were still at a certain place, or a second or third, he would look them up.  Never, apparently, did his work suffer in the least.